After the successful transfer of the App, will the push certificate immediately become invalid and must it be regenerated under the new entity

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Created 21h

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Hello, We are going to transfer our App to another company’s Apple Developer account. We have been using P12 certificates and P8 keys for APNs push service, and we have several inquiries:

Will the current P12 push certificates expire instantly after successful App transfer? Is it mandatory to recreate P12 certificates under the new account?
Will existing P8 keys be disabled immediately after the ownership transfer? Do we need to generate new P8 keys under the new account?
Without releasing new App builds and updating push credentials after the transfer, can existing end users still receive normal push notifications?

Thanks a lot for your assistance, waiting for your reply.

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Answer 1

Engineer OP

Apple

12h

Once the transfer is complete:

the P12 certificates from the old team will stop working after a trivial but non-zero time has passed. The certificate will not be expired, but will no longer be able to authenticate your servers for the purpose of sending notifications to the app that has been transferred.
the same applies to the provider (JWT) tokens that have been generated using the P8 keys. The tokens will need to be regenerated using a new key that belongs to the new team.
There is no need for a new App build. The old apps that have already been installed will work seamlessly with the new Team's credentials (P12/P8). But new credentials are mandatory.

You may notice an overlap where a connection to APNs that has been opened just before the transfer (and has not been closed) could still be working with the old credentials right after the transfer is complete, but this is not something you can rely on. The old team's servers are expected to close all open connections to APNs once the transfer is initiated to allow a seamless move from the old to the new credentials.

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Answer 2

wangxiaobai OP

4h

Thank you for your reply. Could I understand it this way? After the App transfer is completed, if the original team does not actively shut down the existing APNs and JWT connections and push services, the old P12 certificates and JWT tokens generated by the old P8 keys can still work normally for a short period of time, users can receive push notifications without immediate invalidation. The new company only needs to gradually deploy and replace them with its own new push credentials after receiving the transfer success notification. If so, how many hours does this grace period usually last? Besides, will both the original company account and the new company account receive relevant emails after the transfer is successfully done?

Thanks a lot for your assistance, waiting for your reply.

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